Improvement in worker productivity has been a goal of many enterprises. The field of medicine is an example field where productivity of medical professionals is tracked both for determining how much a medical professional is to be paid based on productivity and for determining how much money to charge to a health management organization (HMO), the government or patients for a medical procedure. A variety of ways of calculating medical professional productivity and compensation have been proposed, some of which have been implemented to greater or lesser extents and with differing results. One way of calculating medical professional productivity may include volume-based metrics attached to the number of patients a medical professional treats or the amount of revenue the medical professional bills or collects.
Recently, medical professional productivity and compensation has trended toward models based on Relative Value Units (RVUs). RVUs may reflect a relative level of time, skill, training and/or intensity of a medical professional to provide a given service. RVUs may be used to calculate the volume of work or effort expended by a medical professional in treating patients, evaluating reports and so forth. Different medical procedures may be assigned different RVUs, based on time, skill needed, procedure complexity, and so forth. For example, surgical procedures may have a higher RVU than well child visits. As a result, medical professionals may receive compensation based on a number of procedures performed and a complexity of the procedures, rather than a number of patients seen or billings collected.
There are a variety of RVU formulas being used for determining medical professional compensation. Formulas used in calculating compensation or bonuses of medical professionals may be complicated or confusing and medical professionals may find calculating productivity, efficiency, compensation and so forth to be difficult, as well as determining how to focus efforts to maximize compensation.